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Tips for Kellogg’s 2024-2025 Essays

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management recently released the 2024-2025 deadlines for its two-year full-time MBA program. The Round 1 application deadline is set for September 11 with Round 2 slated for January 8, and Round 3 on April 2.

The business school requires two essays: the first about applicants’ motivations for pursuing a Kellogg MBA and career goals, and the second about a challenging professional decision and the values that guided it.

ESSAY 1

The first Kellogg essay prompt asks applicants the following:

Intentionality is a key aspect of what makes our graduates successful Kellogg leaders. Help us understand your journey by articulating your motivations for pursuing an MBA, the specific goals you aim to achieve, and why you believe now is the right moment. Moreover, share why you feel Kellogg is best suited to serve as a catalyst for your career aspirations and what you will contribute to our community of lifelong learners during your time here.  (450 words)

Jeremy Shinewald, an admissions consultant at mbaMission, says this essay is essentially asking you to provide a standard personal statement: explain your goals, motivations, timing, and why Kellogg is the right fit for you. The most challenging part for most applicants, Shinewald says, is the tight 450-word limit—which allows for two or three paragraphs.

“You will need to be concise, direct, and clear,” Shinewald says. “This is, we believe, where the ‘intentionality’ factor really comes in. If you are truly focused on your goals and your vision of your future—in other words, if your intentions are strong and set—you should be able to articulate the different elements of your path pretty easily.”

ESSAY 2

The second Kellogg essay prompt asks applicants the following:

Kellogg leaders are primed to tackle challenges everywhere, from the boardroom to their neighborhoods. Describe a specific professional experience where you had to make a difficult decision. Reflecting on this experience, identify the values that guided your decision-making process and how it impacted your leadership style. (450 words)

This essay, Shinewald says, is all about how you approach and navigate situations where things are not as clear-cut as you’d like. Shinewald recommends sharing an anecdote where something was at stake. Your essay should walk readers through your decision-making process while noting the potential outcomes of your various choices.

“How do you reason through options and reach conclusions, especially when doing so is complicated?” Shinewald says. “The prompt very clearly states that the experience you discuss in this essay must be one from your professional past, but the scale or scope of the situation in an objective sense is not as important as how affecting it was for you personally and how revelatory it is of who you are and how you think and operate. This is really what the admissions committee is looking to learn.”

Sources: mbaMission, P&Q, Clear Admit, Stacy Blackman Consulting

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